Multi-objective river-sea-going container barge stowage planning problem with container fragility and barge stability factors

The container development has risen continuously and developed stunningly these recent decades. Accordingly, ports are expected to meet the increasing demand and, at the same time, to remain competitive in terms of prices and services. Unloading operations at each port are costly and time-consuming work. This highlights the importance of completing all processes as efficiently and fast as possible, as this implies significant cost reduction. Similarly, barge stability is a very important and crucial factor that must be respected. In light of this, our paper addresses a highly researched area, the container stowage planning problem. We mainly focus on the stowage of the river-sea-going containership called barges. In our study, we consider the multi-objective aspect of the problem with two realistic objectives to be optimized: shifting operations and stability factor. The first objective is directly related to the economical costs of a stowage plan, it concerns the minimization of the number of empty moves called ‘shiftings’ caused by the last in first out policy. Whereas the second objective function of our problem addresses a crucial factor related to a proper weight distribution in the barge which is stability factor that is defined by the metacentric height. Our model integrates realistic constraints which reflect the real functioning of the terminal and satisfy the given structural and operational constraints related both to the barge and to the containers. Indeed, we developed constraint formulations to insure an efficient location for the set of containers in order to facilitate their retrieval and maintain the barge stability.